How to Swear
by dragondark
Summary: Axel teaches the new kid about cursing.


**disclaimer:** I do not own Kingdom Hearts or, apparently, an ounce of sense. Hooray for floods of Axel/Roxas! Have a flag.

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how to swear

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"Fuck," Roxas says experimentally. His eyes turn upward. "It doesn't feel like anything."

Axel leans against the wall and grins, a white flash nearly lost in the white midst. "Try 'hell'," he suggests.

It's a dull day, meaning Superior's forbidden them to go off-world again while he adjusts his calculations to incorporate their latest additions to Kingdom Hearts. They've already run through the usual gamut of entertainment – staring at a wall, staring at each other, staring into the darkness beyond the castle – and stopped just short of leaving books lying around in the sadism/masochism section of the library. (That, Axel explains solemnly as they watch Larxene pace and rage a mere five shelves away, is because Larxene owns that section and, as everyone in the castle learned after the incident with Demyx and the salad, messing with Larxene's possessions is the charbroiled alternative to suicide.)

After several failures, they settle on a carefully-negotiated middle ground: teaching Roxas swear words. Given the fact that Roxas doesn't actually remember anything about culture, Axel elects to start with the most elaborate off-world phrases ("May your balls drop off and be eaten by rabid camels, with the resulting excrement to be employed in dishonoring the graves of your ancestors!") and make their way down to basics.

Of course, Roxas doesn't see much of a difference between them. 'Fuck' sounds a little too ridiculous to be taken seriously. It rhymes with 'duck', 'cluck', 'yuck' – all the words you'd expect to find in the vocabulary of a five-year-old, which he knows because, more often than not, Axel behaves just like one.

Still, Axel's looking at him with an expression of amused expectancy, so Roxas cocks his head. "Hell," he says, patiently. He's starting to miss the curses about the camels.

Before Roxas even starts to form the question, Axel dismisses it with a wave. "Nah. Even less of a reaction this time. Geez, your Other must've been some kind of white-washed kid." He considers it for all of a moment before twirling a finger. "In combination, maybe."

Roxas blinks and lets his hands drop to his sides. They knot briefly in thought before he opens his eyes. "Hell the damn out of shitting fuck," he says, and Axel explodes into barking laughter all over the corridor. He watches in patience for the first handful of moments. As it continues, he folds his arms and hunches over. When, after several minutes, Axel shows no sign of stopping, Roxas conjures a Keyblade in a whirl of darkness and cold and flings it towards his head.

Axel ducks. The Keyblade jets over him in a whirl of gleaming metal. "Hey!"

"It's not that funny."

"Only 'cause you're standing on the outside of the joke."

At this point, more to keep Axel from winning than anything else, Roxas summons and throws Oathkeeper. The ensuing fight keeps them both busy and distracted for a while.

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In the meeting afterwards, Axel gets assigned to Castle Oblivion.

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If Roxas is honest – and he is: there's no reason for lies between the shadow and the soul – he doesn't think about Axel much after he leaves. True, the halls are wider and colder and more colorless than ever, and when he wakes it's to the quiet of an unused room, but those aren't real changes.

Can things that never were be changed? – but that's philosophy, more Xemnas's field than his own.

It doesn't matter. Even if they could, it's not as if he's ever been alive in the kind of way that might have let him resent them.

So he carries the knowledge simply, like the heart he doesn't have, into world after world until he fights Heartless by instinct, in large and larger swarms. But, rather than report to Superior immediately on his return to The World That Never Was, he heads to the roof. Alone in the dark, he shouts at Kingdom Hearts: curse-shrapnel, jumbled breaths, words crushed to meaningless syllables.

And if you asked him, for the life of it all and the heart he doesn't have, he could never begin to say why.

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Syllables without meaning, a filthy litany: _fuck-damn-ass-shit-hell_. Say the words enough and their definitions invert and empty out. Speak them over and over in circles and they'll come to mean nothing at all.

Long before he gets there, his tongue starts to slip on the words, which break and mingle their pieces into gabble: _full-dash-it has-ack_.

_Axel,_ he tries instead, but that does nothing at all, just conjures the same casual-complex whirl of memories and the space at his side shining in quiet malice. If it means something, he doesn't understand it any more than he ever did before.

It's not that he misses Axel, he decides. It's that you don't notice the emptiness until there's nothing there to force it back.

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Then Roxas wakes to find a shadow sliding over him.

Before he's fully registered it all, the Keyblades tumble in his hands. He lashes out, sleep-blind but precise. The strike of bone shocks up the blade.

Axel goes sprawling backwards over the floor, laughing all the while. Sound paints every corner in that bare white room: laughter and his own startled breathing, each blade still heavy in his grip.

"Some welcome," he says, smirking as he sits up. "Guess I should be glad I'm only back for a report. Miss me?"

"Jackass," Roxas says, without heat – and he remembers _jackass _is one of the few words that's stuck with him. Because, Axel claims, it's something concrete; because, Roxas thinks, he doesn't have to think about definitions. It's easy. Jackass is the word he associates with Axel.

Then Axel moves, just a jerk of the arm, that familiar lackadaisical uncertainty with none of its precision. If he'd been holding a chakram it would have spun out of his hand and gone careening across the floor. The image is all wrong. Roxas shakes his head, refocusing, and this time he sees it: the ragged weariness yanked back by control tight as puppet strings.

All those secrets, wrapped around Castle Oblivion, and now Axel's meshed in them, too.

"_Axel,_" he grits. Electricity coils inside his bones. His skin is sparking with it, so sharp that the air itself crackles inside every breath. Blankets unspool from him as he swings his legs from the bed. Still he's standing too close, too far, and Axel too brittle to touch anyway. All crooked angles and sudden loss of grace, half-dead from exhaustion and all Roxas can think of is to haul him down the other half.

Feeling, he thinks, aware of how the distant scene has closed into sudden blooms of color. Is this what it's like to feel, all these wretched little jolts?

He _hates_ it.

"Hey." Axel musters a half-smile, ghosting wickedness. "Guess you don't need that list of curses after all."

For an instant, still drowning in a storm, the memory won't register. He only narrows his eyes. "What?"

"Forget it. Just remember how to say things like that and you'll be covered." When Roxas only blinks, he adds, "Got it memorized?"

Roxas stares and stares. All at once the world is steady again, simple lines and silence. Maybe, he thinks, it never fell in the first place. It wouldn't make sense – it's not like he has anything to lose.

He doesn't want to think about explanations just now; all he needs to know is that it isn't empty. That's all.

The acid in his throat eases; his shoulders unknot. He swallows once.

"You make no sense at all," he tells him. Axel grins.

"Yeah? Say it again."

"What?"

"My N-A-M-E," he prompts, tapping his temple.

Roxas's said it so many times in the past few weeks that, for a moment, he barely remembers how to speak it as if it should mean something.

"Axel," he says at last. It doesn't sound any different.

Axel just laughs.

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**end**

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reviews: make me a smile?


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